Radio Free HPC Looks at Azure’s Move to GPUs and OCP for Deep Learning

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team a set of IT and Science stories:

Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Ingrasys announced a new industry standard design to accelerate Artificial Intelligence in the next generation cloud. The Project Olympus hyperscale GPU accelerator chassis for AI, also referred to as HGX-1, is designed to support eight of the latest “Pascal” generation NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA’s NVLink high speed multi-GPU interconnect technology, and provides high bandwidth interconnectivity for up to 32 GPUs by connecting four HGX-1 together. The HGX-1 AI accelerator provides extreme performance scalability to meet the demanding requirements of fast growing machine learning workloads, and its unique design allows it to be easily adopted into existing datacenters around the world.

ARM comes to Azure. As another part of its Project Olympus, Azure is announced it is deploying a large number of ARM-based servers.

Springtime in Naples. AMD hopes to give Intel a run for its money with the new Zen-based Naples server platform. While the server benchmarks aren’t out yet, the desktop Zen chips have shown impressive applications performance for less money than Intel I7 chips.

Huawei Ranks Third Globally for 2016 Q4 Server Shipments. Gartner is out with surprising server market news that shows Huawei showing up at #3 in terms of shipments in 4Q2016. The numbers don’t seem to jive with what IDC says, but an 88 percent jump in severs sales quarter-to-quarter is great news for Huawei.

IBM’s Atomic Storage. This week, IBM announced it has created the world’s smallest magnet using a single atom – and stored one bit of data on it. Currently, hard disk drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit. The ability to read and write one bit on one atom creates new possibilities for developing significantly smaller and denser storage devices, that could someday, for example, enable storing the entire iTunes library of 35 million songs on a device the size of a credit card.

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